With Elected Members, Baghdad City Panel Proves Influential

BAGHDAD, Feb. 17 -- President Bush made sure to set aside time to see them during his quickie Thanksgiving Day trip to Iraq. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell scheduled a meeting with them when he was last here. So did Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans.

In a country in search of new leadership, the 37 members of the Baghdad City Council are quickly becoming influential, if still behind-the-scenes, players. They may not have the name recognition of a grand ayatollah or a wealthy exile, but they have one very important thing going for them: They are the closest thing Iraq has to a democratically elected representative body with real clout.

Selected by their neighbors to serve as liaisons to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, they are doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers and other highly educated citizens. Few had been involved in politics before, but now they speak out as much about national issues as local ones.

With 41/2 months remaining before the scheduled transfer of Iraqi sovereignty from the U.S.-led occupation authority to an interim national government, the Baghdad council is a wild card. Occupation officials and Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council had agreed on an elaborate plan for creating a transitional assembly through provincial caucuses, saying direct elections were not possible before the June 30 handover date, but most council members have since withdrawn support for the plan. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most influential religious leader, has said that nothing short of full elections could produce a government that was representative of the country's population.

The United Nations appears ready to broker a compromise, with elections held sooner than occupation officials wanted but later than Sistani demanded. The Baghdad City Council still has not said where it stands on this question, but its members have been quietly surveying constituents and hope to issue a statement that they say will reflect the true views of the people.

In the seven months since the council was formed, it has become a symbol of hope for democracy in a country that for the most part has known only authoritarian rule and that has been ravaged by violence since the fall President Saddam Hussein. The council's greatest strength and greatest weakness, say those who have worked with it, is its inexperience. Many members have only vague notions about what a campaign or poll or caucus is, but that means the type of democracy they practice is very academic, very pure.

Taking Up Challenges

"They aren't afraid to challenge anyone or anything, and that is a good sign," said Lt. Col. Joe Rice, an Army reservist and former mayor of Glendale, Colo., population 5,000, who is advising the City Council here.

The council has pushed the occupation authority to reconsider its vision for a foreign investment law. It publicly challenged the Governing Council because it was appointed, not elected. And it drafted a list of reconstruction projects that served as the foundation for a report presented at a conference of donors last year in Madrid.

When the Japanese government recently invited a delegation from Iraq to meet with the prime minister, it went to the Baghdad City Council, not the Governing Council. "We decided when we initiated contact with the Iraqi people we wanted to meet with the City Council because they were somewhat democratically elected. That was important," said Matsu Bayashi, first secretary at the Japanese Embassy in Baghdad.

The most telling sign that the City Council had arrived came in November, when the occupation authority unveiled its plan for the formation of an interim Iraqi government that would take power this summer. Under the complicated system, councils in each of Iraq's 18 provinces, or governorates, would have a key part in the initial stage of the process of picking an interim national legislature. The legislature would choose a prime minister or president -- or two or three -- and appoint the rest of the government.

Although the plan is now in flux, members of the Baghdad City Council are poised to play a prominent role in the next government -- perhaps as part of an expanded Governing Council that might rule the country as it prepares for elections, and most definitely, they say, as candidates in eventual elections.

For most Iraqis, choosing a president or prime minister, even indirectly, is an alien concept. Most have lived under only two leaders -- Saddam Hussein and the American civil administrator, L. Paul Bremer, both of whom were forced upon them. So when U.S. troops took to the streets of Baghdad this spring and summer with bullhorns and fliers and invited the people to meetings where they could elect representatives, many came out of curiosity, if nothing else.

Like many members of the Baghdad council, Ali Haidary said he came to vote, not to run. But someone nominated him for a spot on his neighborhood council and he won, and he felt it was his responsibility to serve his people.

"When I came home that day, I told my family I became a member of the local city hall. My family was amazed. What happened? they asked," recalled Haidary, 47, now City Council chairman. More important, they wondered: What does that mean?

Haidary is a serious, meticulous man who studied mechanical engineering in college and, like many other Iraqi men his age, spent time working for the government and time in the army. He now owns an air-conditioning repair company in the middle-class area of Al Adl.

In the weeks following his election to the Al Adl Neighborhood Council, Haidary was elected to represent Al Adl on the Mansoor District Council, which in turn voted him onto the Baghdad City Council. In July, he was elected vice chairman of the City Council. Since being chosen as chairman in January, he has been the top man in a political system that comprises 88 individual councils and more than 750 representatives.

His fellow members of the Baghdad City Council range in age from twenties to late sixties and include sheiks and religious leaders as well as citizens who say they consider themselves secular. Saeb Sideeq Gailani is director general of Medical City, the largest hospital complex in the country; Adnan Abdul Sahib Hassan, 53, is a former flight attendant for Iraqi Airways and was an officer in the old Iraqi army; Fatima Hassan Miqdadi, 41, is a teacher who spent almost all of her twenties in prison because she was suspected of helping the Dawa party, a prominent Islamic political group that opposed Hussein's Baathists.

The council got off to a rocky start when it first met on July 7. Members could barely agree on how to conduct the meetings, not to mention what issues they should address.

In the beginning, the council members focused on issues in their neighborhoods. Haidary, for instance, helped reopen a government shopping center that provided more than 200 jobs. He also got funding to repair 20 of the 22 schools in his area that had not been scheduled for reconstruction. The $480,000 for the schools came from U.S. military commanders, humanitarian groups and the Japanese Embassy.

"I believe the biggest crime Saddam committed was neglecting education," Haidary said. "The Iraqi student in the past was one of the most intellectual, the most clever. But because of Saddam, our students have now reached the lowest level."

A Growing Visibility

The council members' successes and their cooperation with the occupation authority, have made them targets for insurgents. Haidary's Al Adl council offices have been attacked several times, and one of his fellow council members was shot and killed. Two other members of the neighborhood councils in Baghdad have died in ambushes. In December, a bomb went off in front of one City Council member's house. Hebrew language professor Ali Hussein Amiri's 20-year-old son had walked out the door and found a pen on the steps. When he picked it up, it blew his hand off.

As the months have passed, the council has sought to expand its role. Members have challenged occupation officials on a number of issues, asking for control of the city budget and demanding authority to inspect the progress of reconstruction projects.

"We shouldn't have to go to CPA for everything we do," Nashat Husseini argued at one meeting, using the initials of the Coalition Provisional Authority. "We should be able to do it ourselves." He said too many Iraqis -- other than themselves -- are as afraid of being punished by the Americans for challenging authority as they were of Hussein.

In November and December, the United States, Japan and Turkey separately invited the Baghdad City Council to visit.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi Governing Council, which had all but ignored the Baghdad City Council some months ago, recently began sending representatives to its weekly meetings. Senior occupation officials, including those in charge of electricity and reconstruction contracting, have also come to seek the representatives' advice.

The biggest question for the City Council remains what members think about how a sovereign Iraq should be created. The committee assigned to look at the issue remains divided over a caucus system or direct elections.

Council member Miqdadi said that she supports Sistani's call for direct elections and that people should think of him not as a religious figure but as a scholar. "He studied international relations and he knows about politics. We believe very much that his thoughts are with the times," she said.

Basim Salih Yaaqubi, 39, a financier who serves on the council, disagrees. Direct elections, he says, are not practical at this time for many reasons, including the fact that the political system is still developing and that security is so poor that there is a danger polling places would be attacked.

But both quickly said that if the council's survey shows the public's opinion differs from theirs, they will support the people. "In democracy, that is how things should work," Yaaqubi said, as if quoting from a textbook. "You go with the majority."

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